essere come voi non è così facile: Spatial Barriers, Mental Obstacles, Social Borders. The Mental Disorder in Amelia Rosselli

Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is to analyse the expression of mental illness in the poetry of Amelia Rosselli. The examination of its semantic and grammatical aspects allows to discover two essential senses of Amelia Rosselli’s poetry: imprisonment and exclusion. The first is expressed trough some horizontal and vertical spatial metaphors, the second trough an obsessive repetition of the personal pronouns that mark the social borders. The subject constantly opposes itself to the other grammatical persons. So, while the subject finds itself into an enclosed and fenced space, the mind and body become both a tower to defend and a prison from which escape. The act of drawing borders has a double sense. The society excludes our subject building a system of barriers that preclude any possibility of overcoming. In the same time the illness of the subject does not allow to draw a secure borders to its physical and mental space, to establish the Heideggerian (existential) distance between oneself, the world, and the other. The oppression of the physical, mental and social space is one of the founding points of Amelia Rosselli’s poetics. While the XX century literature is permeated by the language of the psychiatric discourse, this poetry wants to free the artistic speech from the alienation of the madness expressed by the medical discourse, to offer a spontaneous and emancipated voice of madness.